Charlton Heston

Birthday: 4 October 1923, Evanston, Illinois, USA

Height: 6' 3" (1.91 m)

Biography

With features chiseled in stone, who else but Charlton Heston could you picture as Michelangelo, as Ben-Hur, as Moses? Heston's movie career took off with The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and reached light speed with Ben-Hur (1959). Although he has played a pantheon of larger-than-life roles, he usually prefers to talk about the day-to-day daily grind of the movie business, and especially credits the writers and directors he has worked for much of his success 

Heston frequently recounted that, while growing up in northern Michigan in a sparsely populated area, he often wandered in the forest, "acting" out the characters from books he had read.^[15] Later, in high school, Heston enrolled in New Trier's drama program, playing in the silent 16 mm amateur film adaptation of Peer Gynt, from the Ibsen play, by future film activist David Bradley released in 1941.^[16] From the Winnetka Community Theatre (Or, the Winnetka Dramatist's Guild as it was then known) in which he was active, he earned a drama scholarship to Northwestern University. Several years later Heston teamed up with Bradley to produce the first sound version of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in which Heston played Mark Antony.

World War II service

In 1944, Heston enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces. He served for two years as a radio operator and aerial gunner aboard a B-25 Mitchell stationed in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands with the Eleventh Air Force. He reached the rank of Staff Sergeant. Heston married Northwestern University student Lydia Marie Clarke in the same year he joined the military. After his service and rise to fame, Heston was chosen as a narrator for highly classified military and Department of Energy instructional films, particularly relating to nuclear weapons, and "for six years Heston [held] the nation's highest security clearance" or Q clearance." The Q clearance is similar to a DoD or Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) clearance of TS.^[17]

Theater and television

After the war, Heston and Clarke lived in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, where they worked as artists' models. Seeking a way to make it in theater, Heston and his wife Lydia decided to manage a playhouse in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1947. They made $100 a week. In 1948, they returned to New York where Heston was offered a supporting role in a Broadway revival of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, starring Katharine Cornell. In television, Heston played a number of roles in CBS's Studio One, one of the most popular anthology dramas of the 1950s. Film producer Hal B. Wallis of Casablanca spotted Heston in a 1950 television production of Wuthering Heights and offered him a contract. When his wife reminded Heston they had decided to pursue theater and television, he replied, "Well, maybe just for one film to see what it's like."

Heston most frequent stage roles included the title role in Macbeth, Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.

In 1995, Heston starred with Peter Graves, Mickey Rooney and Deborah Winters in the Warren Chaney docudrama America: A Call to Greatness.^[18] In 1998, Heston had a cameo role playing himself in The One with Joey's Dirty Day on the American television series Friends.

Charlton Heston as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, 1950

Hollywood

Heston's first professional movie appearance was in Dark City, a 1950 film noir. His breakthrough came when Cecil B. DeMille cast him as a circus manager in The Greatest Show on Earth, which was named by the Motion Picture Academy as the best picture of 1952. In 1953, Heston was Billy Wilder's first choice to play Sefton in Stalag 17. However, the role was given to William Holden, who won an Oscar for it. Heston became an icon for portraying Moses in the hugely successful film The Ten Commandments (1956), reportedly being chosen by director Cecil B. DeMille because he thought the muscular, 6 ft 3 in, square jawed Heston bore an uncanny resemblance to Michelangelo's statue of Moses. In 1955, he appeared with Jane Wyman in the film, Lucy Gallant, the story of a woman determined to hold on to her dress shop in a small Texas oil-boom community. In 1958, Heston played a Mexican police officer, Ramon Miguel Vargas, in Orson Welles's widely acclaimed film noir Touch of Evil.

From the film trailer of Ben-Hur

Heston poses for his wife Lydia at their hilltop Beverly Hills home, just after winning an Oscar for his role in Ben-Hur, 1960.

After Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Rock Hudson^[19] turned down the title role in Ben-Hur (1959), Heston accepted the role, winning the Academy Award for Best Actor, one of the unprecedented eleven Oscars the film earned. After Moses and Ben-Hur, Heston became more identified with Biblical epics than any other actor. He voiced the role of Ben-Hur in a cartoon version of the Lew Wallace novel in 2003.

Heston played leading roles in a number of fictional and historical epics: El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963), as Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), and Khartoum (1966). Heston also played the eponymous role in the western movie Will Penny (1968).

In 1965-71, Heston was the elected president of the Screen Actors Guild. The Guild had been created in 1933 for the benefit of actors, who had different interests than the producers and directors who controlled the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Heston was more conservative than most actors, and publicly clashed with the outspoken liberal actor Ed Asner.^[20]

In 1968, Heston starred in Planet of the Apes and in 1970, he had a smaller supporting role in the sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Also in 1970, Heston portrayed Mark Antony again in another film version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. His co-stars included Jason Robards as Brutus, Richard Chamberlain as Octavius, Robert Vaughn as Casca, and English actors Richard Johnson as Cassius, John Gielgud as Caesar, and Diana Rigg as Portia. In 1971, he starred in the science fiction film, The Omega Man. Although critically panned, the film is now considered a classic of post-apocalyptic horror. In 1972, Heston made his directorial debut and starred as Mark Antony in an adaptation of the William Shakespeare play he had performed earlier in his theater career, Antony and Cleopatra. Hildegarde Neil was Cleopatra and English actor Eric Porter was Enobarbus. After receiving scathing reviews, the film was never released to theaters, and is rarely seen on television. It was finally released on DVD in March 2011.^[21] He subsequently starred in more successful films such as Soylent Green (1973) and Earthquake (1974).

Beginning with playing Cardinal Richelieu in 1973's The Three Musketeers, Heston was seen in an increasing number of supporting roles, cameos and live theater. From 1985 to 1987, he starred in his only prime-time stint on a television series in the soap, The Colbys. With his son Fraser, he produced and also starred in several TV movies, including remakes of Treasure Island and A Man For All Seasons. In 1992, Heston appeared on the A&E cable network in a short series of videos, Charlton Heston Presents the Bible, reading passages from the King James Version. Filmed in the Middle East, the series received excellent reviews, achieving great success on video and DVD. Never taking himself too seriously, he appeared in 1993 in a cameo role in Wayne's World 2, in a scene where the main character Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers) requests casting a better actor for a small roll. After the scene is reshot with Heston, Campbell weeps in awe. That same year, Heston hosted Saturday Night Live. He had cameos in the films Hamlet, Tombstone and True Lies. He starred in many theatre productions at the Los Angeles Music Center, where he appeared in Detective Story and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, and as Sherlock Holmes in The Crucifer of Blood opposite Jeremy Brett as Dr. Watson. Heston later won acclaim for a television production interpretation of the famous detective. In 2001, Heston made a cameo appearance as an elderly, dying chimpanzee in Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes. Heston's last film role was as the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in My Father, Rua Alguem 5555, which had limited release (mainly to festivals) in 2003.^[22]

Heston's distinctive voice had also landed him roles as a film narrator, including Armageddon and Disney's Hercules.

Heston played the title role in Mister Roberts three times and cited it as one of his favorite roles. In the early 1990s, he tried unsuccessfully to revive and direct the show with Tom Selleck in the title role.^[23]